tenebrae
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
They stand, she above and him below, both lost in their remembering. She sees and he… does not.
Boudika studies the shape he makes upon the sand. A smudge of charcoal.
Tenebrae listens to the sea. It has mocked him all day. Sung to him like a siren all day. Hissed angrily at him all day. Beat upon the sand like an osprey’s wing upon the air all day.
He has not moved, not even an inch. Only his shadows shift, like smoke furling and unfurling, lazily, restless. Now it is not just that darkness surrounds him. It is within too. His punishment has left him, eternally black, locked away within his body. Locked away within Caligo’s black because that is all he should and ever should be focussed upon. So they said.
But he is still here, upon the sea edge, just beyond her reach. She crawls, slick, upon the sand and he hears her coming and prays she might touch. But the moon always pulls her back at the last.
The Moon.
He is not here for the sea.
The pounding of its waves are all day Boudika’s osprey wings as she ascended like a god. (He does not know that as she ascends within his memory, she descends the cliff in his present). She slinks to him and it is a blessing he cannot yet hear well enough to learn her footfalls across sand. If he did, he would mourn how he could not see her, to drink the sight of her body (even filled with ire and hatred as it is). Even angry, the sight of her in his eyes would be like water across his parched tongue.
His head hangs low with the shame of his sin, but it drops lower still with the weight of his love. It is a blessing she left him. A blessing his last sight of her was a bird ascending, beautiful, free. He does not know how he has chained her, kept her tethered in the cage of their want and his love. Tenebrae does not know how the tether pulls her down, down to the beach and to his side.
Stripped of his sight, the white, dirtied bandage tied about his eyes, he does not know how long Boudika watches him, studies him. He feels the static of her presence, the touch of her eyes that prickles electric across his cheek, his shoulder, the places that she had touched, that still remember her.
His eyes are shut beneath the bandage. He does not know how they look, now their sight is gone - are they black? Are they still white, just, simply, sightless? Or are they cloudy and so utterly wrong? No matter what his eyes are now, his ears struggle to make up for what they have lost. They listen to a fountain of sounds and his mind tries to piece them together with the stories his eyes once told them. Stories of a girl as bright as a tiger, as wicked as an alligator, as sharp as a shark.
Above him the sky mourns. It is a painting of their relationship: bruised and bloodied, beautiful and catastrophic. Even if he cannot see it, the monk feels it in his heart - the tissue there, bruised and bloodied, beautiful and ruined. Even in the eternal darkness of his punishment, the darkness in which he can focus only upon Caligo, not even the Order would believe he would still hold his love of Boudika, like a light within which he wards off the darkness. That light, he knows, is an eternal thing and it will never relent to the darkness.
Tenebrae. She says, when the sun’s light goes out and the sky dies (like his love will not). He startles, surprised by her voice, so close, so loud. He is darkness within, darkness without, but he turns to her, his light. The Disciple knows only the side of him that she stands, he knows not exactly where. He fills his mind with the memory of her looks. From her voice, her tone he paints the lines of her face. He wants to touch her face, to know if his memory is anything close to the truth. He has drawn so many emotions from her over their time together. Her bites at his throat throb for her nearness. His scars twinge with the ache of how he broke for her. The monk belongs to her more than he does to the Night Order. He pushes the thought away and pretends he can see her brightness through the dirtied bandages about his eyes.
“Boudika.” The monk breathes, her name still sounding like salvation upon his lips.
